The Professional Gamer - June 6, 2016

Hello readers and welcome to another installment of The Professional Gamer.  I hope you all had a good Memorial Day.  I spent my morning running the Bolder Boulder.  Then, most of the rest of the day was spent recovering from the race.  I had a decent time this year, especially considering how much my training was interrupted this year due to a number of other life events. During the rest of the week, I spent most of my free time this week reading, but also finished watching Golden Boy with my friends.

Let's start this week with discussing Golden Boy, which wins the award for the most raunchy anime that my wife enjoys to watch.  Kintaro is a rather terrible perv, but in the end he also has a drive to do good for those around him.  I want to really hate him for his lecherous ways, but in the end he tries to make sure that things turn out well for everybody around him, so it is hard to be too hard on him.

In book news, this week I've been reading Robert's Rules of Order, Newly Revised, which is basically the big book of how to run a meeting for a voluntary society, club, or business.  It's very interesting to see a general set of rules that can be adapted to many different types of organizations.  I wanted to read the book due to getting involved in my local political party, since parliamentary procedure is big part of the official meetings that we have.  In the end, it makes me wonder if I should have more structure in my day to day interactions with lots of people.  Also, I just want to start a club so that I can practice with all the finicky procedural stuff.  Does that make me too much of a nerd?

Anyway, today is my birthday! Yay! Happy Birthday to me!  Have a great week, and game on!

The Professional Gamer - May 16, 2016

After all of the weird stuff that happened last week, I'm happy to have had a more normal schedule this week.  I was able to play some video games, had a day off of work, and went to the theater.  In all, a lot of fun this week.

In Elite: Dangerous, I've got my Type 7 Transport equipped with all the best modules.  I feel like I've run into a lot of bugs involving interdiction, and ended up getting blasted up by a lot of NPC jerks.  I've re-tooled my ship to focus on defense, rather than offense.  Considering that running is the more practical option for me in most cases.  I should be in a good place to start running a regular trading route to pick up the credits that I need in order to get to the next ship.

For those not in the Denver area, I may need to provide some background information about what I did in the middle of this week.  Devotchka is a local band (who has had some level of national success), and they are known locally for annual concerts with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.  This year, they partnered with the Denver Center theater company to perform Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.  And, with only a few performances left, I managed to get in to see the show.  It was a whole lot of fun.  I was really impressed with the performances, and had a lot of fun watching it.

That's all for this week.  Have a great week and game on! 

The Professional Gamer - May 9, 2016

Hello readers! This has been a very intense week on the more personal scene.  Crystal ended up in the ER (she’s fine) and I had a job interview.  Between the two, and trying to make up for the time I missed from work, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do anything for myself.  During most of the evenings I ended up watching various HGTV shows with Crystal, since those are a bit of a comfort show for both of us.

We had our second session of Traveler this weekend, which involved some interstellar travel, trade negotiations, and problematic passengers.  We had a bit of a time sorting out all of the rules, but I think we are gradually getting a handle on it.  I’m now on the hunt for some simple apps that will simplify some of the dice rolling (looking at you trading rules).  We’ll be taking the weekend off for Mother’s Day, and I have no idea which players will come the weekend after that, so we may end up playing a completely different game.

Also, I am now the proud owner of a Type 7 Heavy in Elite: Dangerous.  It’s a bit of a beast to handle, but it can carry such a huge amount of cargo.  And, although it is not the fastest profit, I’m opting to do multi-hop trading.  Mostly so that I can get to see more of the inhabited galaxy.  In fact, I equipped a discovery scanner in place of my smallest cargo rack, primarily because I’m visiting systems that I’ve never been to before, and it would be hard to find the stations without the navigation data.  As an added bonus, I can sell the scan data to help subsidize the original purchase cost.  At this point, I’m planning to sink some money to upgrade my ship with top of the line frameshift drive (to maximize profit/hour) and thrusters (a valuable quality of life upgrade).

That’s all that I have for this week.  I hope everyone had a great free comic book day.  Have a great week, and game on!

Anime Southwest - A Quick Review

Last weekend Anime Southwest had it's (technically) first event. Due to some personal circumstances I was not able to go near as long as I wanted, but I was able to get a decent handle on the event. 

To start the event was short handed due to a number of staff bowing at the week before the convention happened. The rumors (and that is all I can call them at this time) is that staff from a different con was supposed to assist, but opted not to at the last moment. Despite this problem the staff that were there all friendly. When I met with the press head he took the time to give me a tour of the convention showing me where the panel rooms, VG Room, Main Event, and Dealer room were. It was a much appreciated tour. I also spoke to a few guests and they were appreciative to what the staff were doing for them. One group had a technical issue that was handled in short order while another was able to get an impromptu Digimon panel setup. I hope that in future years they can keep up this level of dedication.

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As for the venue, it was definitely not the location they had wanted, but they were able to make it work. The center of the convention featured Artist Alley.  To get to any of the other rooms you had to go past the artists. They also had the small restaurant with, what I assume, were free snacks to keep the attendees going strong. While I don't see this happening in the future, or at least for all future cons, it was a nice gesture. 

Do I plan to attend next year? Yes, I do. Hopefully I won't have the same personal problems next year to keep me from attending all weekend, so I can truly enjoy Anime Southwest. And for those that want to see the photos I did manage to take, they can be found here.